As a freshman, you can’t command your teammates’ respect any quicker than if you bleed, and Jordan Schakel accomplished that six games into his first season for San Diego State.

In the semifinal of the Wooden Legacy against Georgia, the mop-haired kid who doesn’t look all that menacing – even at 6-feet-6 — showed he might just step in front of a train for the team.

He basically did.

Coming of the bench, Schakel sacrificed himself to take two charges that resulted in fouls and Bulldogs turnovers, and then came the play that defined his desire to do anything to contribute.

Georgia’s hulking Yante Maten – the 6-foot-8, 250-pound NBA prospect who was a preseason SEC choice for co-Player of the Year – already had drawn a flagrant foul call for elbowing Malik Pope.

Then Schakel – giving up two inches and nearly 50 pounds in the matchup – posted up on Maten.

“He was probably expecting it to be easy,” Schakel recalled after a recent practice for the Aztecs, who play at Air Force on Wednesday.

“I probably surprised him, and I took advantage of that. I was going to make sure everything he did was hard.”

Hard, yes. Like the vicious elbow to Schakel’s mouth, which immediately started dripping blood.

“Crazy,” Schakel said. “Worst I’ve ever taken.”

After a video review, the referees let Maten off with a technical foul, but SDSU got two free throws and the ball. And they eventually came from behind to win 75-68.

Schakel played only 15 minutes in the game, took two shots and scored one 3-pointer. And gained mad regard from everybody in the Aztecs locker room.

Remembering Schakel’s Georgia effort, assistant coach Dave Velasquez crouched and mimicked a baseball player sticking out his chin to take a high-and-tight fastball.

“That’s how he plays,” Velasquez said. “If it wasn’t about the team, or if he wasn’t willing to be tough, he wouldn’t have put his nose in there. He has stepped up to guard whoever we’ve needed him to on the floor.

“And it wasn’t like he’s just doing that for us; he’s been doing that his whole life.”

Schakel came to SDSU as a four-star recruit who chose Montezuma Mesa over USC, Stanford and Cal. He scored 1,607 points for L.A. South Bay power Bishop Montgomery and won 118 games there, including the State Open Championship as a senior.

He hadn’t been on anybody’s bench since his freshman year of high school.

But as a first-year shooting guard at SDSU, he had senior Trey Kell and two juniors, Devin Watson and Jeremy Hemsley, ahead of him, and Schakel had to get used to the speed of the game and the discipline required on defense.

“Extremely difficult,” Schakel said of having to watch, but the Aztecs coaches say he has put as much work in as any young player in the program – ever.

“And it’s so much more than the time he puts in,” Velasquez said. “He’s working on the right things. There’s a perfectionist aspect to him. He wants to be known not just as a great shooter, but a great basketball player.

“He’s not a guy who thinks he’s close to where he’s going to end up. He’s really driven to take that next step.”

Schakel grew up in Torrance as a Lakers fan, and by middle school he was so inspired by Kobe Bryant that he couldn’t wait to get out to the court each morning to practice. He said he’d wake up at 5, shoot for an hour before school, and then practice or play in the afternoon.

It’s not any different now. Schakel is known for getting to SDSU’s JAM Center early in the morning to shoot until he has to go to class. He returns for more than two hours of practice, and stays afterward. He admitted that he sometimes can’t sleep, and might go back to the JAM late at night.

Velasquez reaches out to top NBA players to find shooting drills. Golden State’s Stephon Curry has one in which he shoots 100 shots – 10 each from 10 different spots. Curry’s expectation is to make at least 90 percent of them.

Schakel’s record thus far, Velasquez reported, is 87.

“He always wants to beat Curry,” the coach said.

The work ethic was no doubt gleaned from his parents, who are both USC alums. Schakel’s father, Dan, is an in-home rehabilitation specialist, while his mother, Dr. Stefanie Bodison, is an assistant professor for research at USC who specializes, according to the school’s website, in “sensorimotor and neurodevelopmental intervention technique” for children with autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental disabilities.

Bodison has traveled the world sharing her knowledge.

“Both my parents have worked hard and inspired me,” said Schakel, who had a 4.2 grade-point average in high school. “I think that’s a big part of it. I couldn’t watch them work hard and have me sitting around doing nothing.”

Earlier in the season, Schakel and Kell roomed together on the road and hit it off. The freshman considers the senior a mentor, while Kell said, “Jordan is my guy. The main thing I preach with Jordan – I can tell he’s a perfectionist; he doesn’t like messing up; he kind of beats himself up, which is kind of what I do. I tell him to move onto the next play, because he’s a tremendous shooter.”

It’s as challenging position to be in when you’re taking hundreds of shots a day and not getting much payoff for the practice. That changed last week in a home victory over Wyoming.

In his second shift of the game, Schakel had the rare time to find a rhythm. In a seven-minute span that saw SDSU extend its lead from nine points to 22 by halftime, he knocked down three 3-pointers, a layup, had a steal and three rebounds (giving him five for the half).

The 11 points at halftime were more than Schakel had scored in a game, and he finished with 14.

“It was really cool to have a game like that,” Schakel said. “All the shooting paid off. You keep tell yourself it will, but until it does you have that thing in the back of your head, wondering if it’s going to happen.”

Velasquez, thrilled to see Schakel break out, remembered putting his arm around the kid at halftime.

“His comment to me was, “I’m locking up, huh?’ He meant that he was locking them up on defense,” Velasquez said. “He didn’t bring up the fact that he was making shots. He was happy he was guarding well.

“It’s a gift,” the coach added, “to have that kind of ability and discipline.”

Aztecs at Air Force

Saturday: 6:30 p.m. at Clune Arena

On the air: CBS Sports Network; 1360-AM, 101.5 FM

Records: Air Force is 10-15, 4-9; SDSU is 15-10, 7-7

Series history: The teams have met 79 times overall, with the Aztecs leading 55-23. SDSU is 19-16 at Air Force and lost 60-57 last year there. In the first meeting this year, SDSU won 81-50 on Feb. 3.

Air Force update: In the past seven games, which included the loss at SDSU, the Falcons are 2-5. Most recently, they won two games at home against weaker teams in the Mountain West (10th-place Colorado State and sixth-place New Mexico) and were then beaten on the road by second-place Boise State and fourth-place UNLV. Air Force’s “Princeton” offense isn’t very effective. The Falcons rank 10th in the MW in scoring offense (68.7 points per game), 10th in field-goal percentage (42 percent), last in 3-point field goals (32.4 percent) and 10th in rebounding offense (32 rpg).The scoring leader is Lavelle Scottie (12.1 ppg), who was 8 of 13 to score 16 points in the last meeting with SDSU. Defensively, Air Force has the second-worst field-goal defense (47.4 percent), though it is mid-pack in points allowed (73.4). At Clune Arena, the Aztecs won’t have to worry about a disruptive crowd. Only San Jose’s attendance is worse, with Air Force averaging 1,862 per game.

Aztecs update: SDSU is coming off two dominating home wins, against Wyoming and UNLV, that have it believing it can make a big run in the final four regular-season games heading into the MW Tournament. The Aztecs draw ninth-place Air Force and last-place San Jose State on the road, where they are 1-6 in conference. To keep the players from being overconfident, head coach Brian Dutcher has reminded them repeatedly that they lost to both teams last year away. “Anything can happen,” he said. And it did last year at Air Force, when the Aztecs blew a 14-point lead in a 60-57 defeat. It didn’t help that Malik Pope suffered a freaky and frightening neck injury that kept him out of the last 14:21 of the game. Three weeks ago, the Aztecs used a mid-week bye to work on their zone defense for Air Force, and they were so good executing it that the Falcons scored on only 32.8 percent of their shots. Dutcher expects Air Force to be better prepared for the zone this time, so the Aztecs worked on their man-to-man this week. Four Aztecs scored in double figures against Air Force, led by Jalen McDaniels with 16 (he also had 13 rebounds). The Aztecs played without senior Trey Kell, who has returned to produce 12 assists in the last two games.

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